Two of the crane arms snapped simultaneously, and the astrodyne went sailing majestically away, apparently undisturbed. One of the flailing booms caught Demogorgon a glancing bow, and he went off into the dark sky, screaming.
"Holy shit!" Krzakwa was frozen for a moment. He spatthe cigar butt out, gunned the crane's engines, and went lumbering off after the flying reactor.
Sealock routed himself through Shipnet to the CM's teleoptic system and accessed a monitor grid array showing the object's motion dynamics as a simple trajectory. "No sweat," he said. "Plenty of time." He fed the now generated capture data to Krzakwa. "Shut up, Tabari, you're in a worksuit. Turn on the control-moment gyros and you'll come down on your feet someday."
Demogorgon stopped screaming and looked around. He realized that he was still flying upward and that the ship was far away. After a while he began to enjoy the view.
The crane quickly caught up with the astrodyne, though there seemed to be little time to spare. Krzakwa wrapped the remaining arms around the reactor, then set the treads to "freewheel" and slowly applied the brakes. The crane shuddered, vibrating, the pressure of fricative surfaces transmitted to their ears by the various sound-shorts of the vehicle's structure as a high-pitched vibrato squeal. When the kinetic energy had been spent they came to a stop. He carefully drove over to the reactor base, now close, and set his charge down. He looked at Sealock.
The man had an odd look, almost smiling. "Well," he said.
"Yeah. What do you suppose would've happened if it'd crashed?"
"I don't know. There's not too much in there to break. . . . It's a tough machine, but if the cable had come off, Deepstar would've shut down . . ."
". . . and then the ion fuel would've exploded." He looked pale. "Maybe we'd better be a little more careful, huh?"
Sealock wiped the cold sweat from his upper lip and nodded. "Yeah."
The colonists ate supper in a subdued silence. No one was talking much, though the engineers tried to make light of their near disaster. Afterward, while the others sat around to chat and plan, Sealock rose and went to his private compartment, where he shut himself in. He toyed with some electronic components he'd been working on, trying to concentrate, to regulate his ideas, then sighed and, stringing up a hammock that he particularly liked, lay down. That was one of the good things about getting gravity back. He'd never liked em-beds, no matter how popular they were, and useful for sex. There was something about the sway of a hammock, especially in low g . . .
Personal lapses of judgment, especially ones that he might consider his own, put him in a bad mood. If they'd still been on Earth, he'd've gone to the gym, found an unsuspecting sparring partner, and beaten the hell out of him. That form of release was not available to him here. He lay there for a while, feeling restless to no effect, then the door chirped at him. "Who is it?" he snarled.
"Thy aziz , O fated one." The voice was pitched soft and high.
"Go away."
"Please, Brendan."
He clenched his jaws momentarily, considering an array of possible angry responses, then said, "All right. Come in."
The door quarter-paneled open and Demogorgon slid through. He walked lightly across to Sealock and looked down at him, putting one tapering fingered hand on his broad, ridged chest. He smiled and started to slide his hand downward, but Brendan shook him off angrily. "No. Get out." The Arab looked pained. "I want to help. I know something's wrong. . . ."
"Nothing's wrong," he snapped in exasperation. In truth, it was such a small thing . . . but how could he have forgotten the basic laws of motion? It wasn't just Krzakwa's lapse, stupidity was to be expected from other people, even the best of them, but he'd forgotten as well.
"Look," Demogorgon was saying. "I've seen you get into these moods before." He put his hand on the other man again. "I can fix you right up."
Sealock laughed harshly. "Wrong mood, asshole. Go away."
"But I want to. . . ."
"And I don't! Go find someone else."
"There is no one else. Please."
"No." Brendan sat up. "There's going to have to be someone else, sooner or later. I told you not to come, but you wouldn't listen to me—now you're the only fag in the world."
"You're being cruel."
"I'm being honest. For a change. I can't take care of you forever. I won't." Lying back down. Brendan stared at the wall. "Why don't you go try one of the girls? You'll like it. I promise."
"You know I can't."
"I know you won't try. Well, now you have to. Go away."
After a while Demogorgon did leave.
Alone again, Sealock's inner turmoil grew until it reached a point that was almost despair. Nobody to beat up, not in a mood for sex . . . shit. People, if they are fortunate, always have a few ways of dealing with inexplicable personal tumult. The accident with the reactor wasn't really bothering him ... he knew that, and knew further that he was suffering from nothing more than a sort of sourceless anxiety, unfocused, a neurosis-like reaction to his attention having been called to the fundamental directionlessness that seems to infest every human life, no matter how strongly patterned, no matter how purposeful and ordered its days seemed to be.
He rose and, going to a storage cabinet, drew out twelve brain-tap waveguides. Some people take drugs, surrender themselves to the induced monomania of utterly false visions —psychotropic chemistry can erect a structure where none exists. Brendan Sealock had Comnet, and it was a thing he understood well. The past can make the present seem like a logical end point to all that has gone before, even when it is not.
Lying down again, he plugged the jacks into his skull, each making a satisfying click as it snapped into place. Octa-deka Prime OS flooded into his soul, and he drifted down the long, dark tunnels of his life. One of the functions that he himself had designed, a sort of therapy that he'd pioneered as a late adolescent at NYU, was an absolute mental cross indexing. Now he drifted through abrilliantly colored sea of experience, watching all the things he'd done and been, all the scenes that had passed before his eyes. He waited for a meaningful moment to arrive and, after a while, one did. He seized on it, on a time nearly thirty years gone. They sent me away, he thought, and tears gathered in his eyes, unaware. The word for it is catharsis.
Brendan awoke, as he always did these days, feeling lost. There was a little surge of chest-tightening fear that died down swiftly as his dominant intellectual drivers geared into life and smothered the ever present whisperings of intuitional modes in shattered disarray. When he sat up in the soft bed, yawning and throwing back the heavy, down-filled comforter, he was himself again.
"Bren?" That came from the next bed, in a thin, high, rather nasal voice, and he looked over. Kenny Stein was a small, pudgy, flat-faced nine-year-old, with brown eyes and kinky, almost Afrolike hair. He was just another exile here, thrown out of Taho Kibbutz by his people, themselves exiled from the low-tech horrors of Southern California. Sealock didn't like the whining little shit, but then again, he did.
"Fuck off, Stein." There was a swift wash of anger, demanding a response, on the boy's face, but he said nothing. Brendan in a bad mood was too much for him to trifle with. Out here, at the Phoenix School for Communal Exiles, they lived. There were hundreds of them, children for whom the future had temporarily darkened, sent here from the many corners of one of Earth's largest political entities. They lived here, emotional and psychological "cripples," waiting for their problems to be fixed by men who lurked somewhere in the darkness, waiting like defective machines to be assaulted by the mechanics of the mind.